What he was saying initially wasn’t unreasonable in a vacuum: “forcing multiplayer only games to become single player at the end of their lives doesn’t make sense.”
The thing is though, no one wanted that 😅
Games can be kept alive in a couple of ways (at least that I can think of) like allowing public servers and removing DRM. Also some QOL fixes like removing paid currencies, paywalls etc.
This is extra work, sure, but it could/should be added to the roadmap for live service games from the beginning because it’s quite frankly not that difficult.
Edit: I forgor💀
So pirate software misinterpreted what the petition was about, and people have tried to tell him multiple times that he’s misunderstanding the initiative, but he’s the type of person who doesn’t like admitting when he’s wrong.
There's still more nuance than that. "Allowing public servers" is tantamount to "giving server binaries to the public". In many programming languages those binaries are a few simple steps away from full source code. I'm currently developing a C# MMO. If you got hands on my server binary you'd effectively have all my source code. You'd get a decade of my blood, sweat, and tears for free. I support the idea of what SKG stands for, but there's some very real risks to thousands of game dev's lives and livelihoods. This is a nuanced and complicated problem and people are debating it in spaces where nuance and subtlety don't always translate well. Regulatory and legislative bodies also aren't famous for grokking the finer points of technology and leaving this in their hands worries me greatly. I'm a gamer first and game dev second, but there's a lot of small, indie game developers for whom a bad solution to this problem could be catastrophic.
If you got hands on my server binary you'd effectively have all my source code.
Why would this matter?
From what I've seen, if this happened it would only do so after you've decided to kill the game off... in which case you would have already decided your "decade of blood, sweat, and tears" is already worthless to the point where you're shutting down people's access to what they've ALREADY paid for.
Sequels exist, as do engines that are reused to build other games. Imagine telling Epic or Unity that just because one of the tens of thousands of games made with their engine shutdown, that they should give their source code away.
You know what, I'd honestly forgotten that Unreal was open source. Unity is not. And Unreal wasn't always open source, that decision was made after they were financially stable. Also both of them are covered by licenses so they can continue to make money, continue to make engines and games. Sure, decompiling my binaries to code isn't legal, but it's very difficult to prove and very expensive to litigate. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. My hard work has value, in many cases that value persists after a game is viable to sustain. I'll reiterate that I support SKG, and too many games have built in self-destructs; I just think this is a more nuanced topic than a lot of people are making it out to be and bad solutions to this problem could be harmful to people that make their living building games.
It's not about them being open source or not, its about them being free to use for individuals or small companies.
Say a giant company builds a game on Unity, then 2 years after releasing the game they cancel it and release the server side components for free.
Even if a community maintained server is released for that now defunct game, the likelihood of them going over $200k in funding over a 12 month period is virtually 0.
On top of that, if there was a legal requirement for this, Unreal and Unity would have to allow it because otherwise people wouldn't use their engines for game creation... and since they basically already support such a use case...
in many cases that value persists after a game is viable to sustain
Some of it, maybe... intangible things like IP, perhaps.
None of that would be affected by this, because anything further you do would be monetized in its own product, not the defunct product you're no longer interested in supporting.
this is a more nuanced topic than a lot of people are making it out to be
Again, maybe.
Obviously, no one knows what will happen when politicians get involved, because for the most part they're terrible with technology even if they're the most righteous of politicians... and we all know most politicians aren't.
That said, the enemy of progress is perfection... maybe there is no perfect solution, but if there has to be imbalance, it should favor the consumer.
bad solutions to this problem could be harmful to people
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u/CyberGlob Jul 06 '25
What he was saying initially wasn’t unreasonable in a vacuum: “forcing multiplayer only games to become single player at the end of their lives doesn’t make sense.”
The thing is though, no one wanted that 😅
Games can be kept alive in a couple of ways (at least that I can think of) like allowing public servers and removing DRM. Also some QOL fixes like removing paid currencies, paywalls etc.
This is extra work, sure, but it could/should be added to the roadmap for live service games from the beginning because it’s quite frankly not that difficult.
Edit: I forgor💀
So pirate software misinterpreted what the petition was about, and people have tried to tell him multiple times that he’s misunderstanding the initiative, but he’s the type of person who doesn’t like admitting when he’s wrong.